CA Buys BlazeMeter to Beef Up DevOps Portfolio

CA Technologies announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire BlazeMeter, which produces performance testing tools for DevOps.

Enterprise infrastructure software provider CA Technologies announced its intent to acquire BlazeMeter, a provider of continuous application performance testing software for DevOps.
CA, on Sept. 20, announced it signed a definitive agreement to acquire privately-held BlazeMeter. Terms of the deal were not disclosed; however, the transaction is expected to close by the end of the year.
CA officials said the acquisition will help the company extend its DevOps portfolio.
DevOps emphasizes cooperation between developers and IT operations. The goal of DevOps is to change and improve the relationship between software developers and operations by advocating better communication and collaboration between the two business units.

DevOps is a cornerstone of CA's product strategy, along with Agile development in general—which complements DevOps. CA said BlazeMeter will integrate with CA's continuous delivery offerings to improve testing efficiency and accelerate the deployment of applications.

In a blog post, Alon Girmonsky, CEO and founder of BlazeMeter, said the company has been growing rapidly over the past four years and now has more than 60 employees spread across offices in Palo Alto, Calif., and Tel Aviv. BlazeMeter has some 3,000 customers, with more than 300 viewed as large enterprise customers, he said.
"BlazeMeter has redefined performance testing with its simplicity, fast-deployment SaaS model, and rapid time-to-value," said Ayman Sayed, president and chief product officer at CA Technologies, in a statement. "The acquisition will reinforce our leadership position in continuous testing, and our efforts to democratize performance testing as organizations accelerate their DevOps journey to drive speed and quality in the delivery of new software updates and innovations."
CA is indeed serious about DevOps. Last year, the company snapped up both Rally and Grid Tools to bolster its Agile and DevOps portfolio. The addition of Grid Tools and Rally enabled CA to beef up its offerings to provide a delivery chain of DevOps technologies from Agile planning to continuous delivery to agile operations.
CA officials said the movement to Agile development practices is enabling software development teams to turn out software at a pace where other components of the software lifecycle struggle to keep up—namely testing, which can become a bottleneck. However, BlazeMeter's software enables enterprises to test earlier in the application lifecycle.
"Developers and performance engineers want to achieve superior test coverage by using open source tools and tools that can integrate well into the developer ecosystem," Girmonsky said in a statement. "Joining forces with CA Technologies will enable BlazeMeter to continue developing our technology while enjoying the vast resources of CA Technologies to better serve our customers."
CA and BlazeMeter share a common vision for the future of open source-based continuous testing, Girmonsky said in his post.
"While nothing compares to the feeling of building an independent company from scratch, I believe it is the right time for BlazeMeter to join forces with CA Technologies—one of the top leaders in enterprise software," he said.
Girmonsky also noted that BlazeMeter's commercial, self-service continuous application performance testing solution is compatible with the open-source Apache JMeter performance testing tool as well as other open source software tools like Selenium, Gatling and Locust.
Last week, CA and BlazeMeter joined forces with 12 other DevOps companies to form the DevOps Express industry initiative at the Jenkins World 2016 conference in Santa Clara, Calif. CA and BlazeMeter joined founding members CloudBees and Sonatype along with Atlassian, Chef, DevOps Institute, GitHub, Infostretch, JFrog, Puppet, Sauce Labs, SOASTA and SonarSource to launch the organization aimed at accelerating the adoption of DevOps.
"We have worked with many enterprises transforming to a continuous delivery process and we see many of the same technologies used in each environment," said Sacha Labourey, CEO and founder of CloudBees, in a statement. "That sparked for us the idea of DevOps Express—key DevOps vendors, working together as a group, to deliver greater value to the DevOps market than any of us could deliver individually."
Donnie Berkholz, research director for Development, DevOps & IT Ops at 451 Research, said aspiring DevOps organizations encounter "significant challenges" with integrating DevOps-related solutions. "By providing an out-of-the-box experience with integrated, battle-tested solutions, the founding members of DevOps Express aim to make it easier for organizations to benefit from the experiences of early adopters," he said in a statement.
In a blog post, Aruna Ravichandran, vice president of DevOps Solution Marketing and Management at CA Technologies, said the DevOps Express group will work together to ease integration across the represented tools and promote more flexible operability for enterprises seeking to adopt DevOps.
"Formally, DevOps Express members will supply reference architectures that describe field-tested integrations of best-in-breed solutions residing on-premises and in the cloud, aimed at improving interoperability across a typical product DevOps tool chain," Ravichandran said.
Though CA has been known to have an acquisitive nature, there is no indication the company is looking at any of the other members of DevOps Express.